Welcome
Hello there!
You’ve stumbled on Liz Cormack’s first semester exploration of spacial visualization at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in Boston, Massachusetts. The majority of the work here was conducted in VIS 2127: Spacial Analysis with Professor Carole Voulgaris, a transportation planner whose work explores how people decide to travel through cities and why, and how the planning field uses quantitative data to influence that behavior.
This is the very beginning of my journey with these concepts, including R, mapping, and thinking about design in three-dimensional space and place. If you have any questions, get in touch at lizcormack[at]gsd.harvard.edu.
Georeferencing Print Maps
Georeferencing is the process of adding geographic coordinate data to a raster image, such as a scanned map, so that it appears in the correct place in a GIS tool. Using ArcGIS, we georeferenced maps from the fabulous Harvard Map Collection.
Seoul, South Korea
In 1899, the first railroads in South Korea were built, connecting Seoul to the surrounding region with modern speed. This map, created a year later, shows Seoul on the cusp of major transformation that would quadruple the city’s size and extend it beyond the Han river in the south.
Adding Points & Polygons to Maps
A description of this section.
Chicago Transit Access
The Chicago Enterprise Zones program offers state and local tax incentives to encourage companies to locate their business in depressed areas of the city. The program aims to stimulate economic and neighborhood growth in six designated zones. Exploring these zones through a transportation lens reveals a substantial gap in transportation investment in these zones that could limit the potential of the City’s investment in the program.
As the visualization below illustrates, many of these zones are located in regions of the city with limited or no transit stops. For example, Zone 3, on the South Side of Chicago, one of the largest Enterprise Zones identified in the program, is not connected to any transit stop on Chicago’s ‘L’ line. The City of Chicago’s Enterprise Zones program must consider transit access in the six zones in order to be effective.
Isochrones
This map shows isochrones based on transit travel times to the nearest school. It demonstrates the following skills:
- Displaying multiple vector layers on the same map
- Calculating and displaying accessibility, based on travel time
Accessibility
This map shows accessibility based on a distance-decay function of the walking time to the nearest transit stop. It demonstrates the following skills:
- Displaying multiple vector layers on the same map
- Calculating and displaying accessibility, based on travel time
- Displaying raster data on a map
